JAC Volume 16 Issue 1

As Gary Olson observes in his introduction to the Lyotard interview, “writing” for Lyotard can be a form of resistance, an attempt to “resist the network of exchanges in which cultural objects are commodities” and to “the simple and naive exchangeability of things in our world” (394). As Olson also observes, Lyotard’s conception of “writing” is connected to feminist issues. The interview provides provocative discussions of these topics. Lyotard’s works themselves, though, provide elaboration on what it is that needs to be resisted.

In the interview, Lyotard says that “writing” differs from academic discourse in general and philosophical discourse in particular in that to write is to “allude to something else which is not easily communicated” (394). Lyotard claims that he is not primarily a writer. Writers are individuals such as Samuel Beckett or Claude Simon who are confronted with the unknown, with language itself (394). They are engaged in battle with and against words and sentences and phrases (394). Lyotard, rather, sees himself as a philosopher in that he is guided by meaning, by an attempt to master the material (394).

To the extent, though, that he is dissatisfied with this approach, he is “between these two ways of writing” (394). He also makes clear that he does not consider his work to be academic writing; he has no experience, he says, “with academic work” (395). Lyotard tell us that Discours, figure, which was presented as a dissertation, was considered “bizarre” to academic people (395). He considers himself to be a teacher rather than an academic, not a master but a “perpetual student, a child” (395). Nor is he a theorist because a theorist is someone who creates systems, provides answers, constructs “isms” (409).

Many of Lyotard’s works actively resist traditional academic forms of discourse. Just Gaming is an extended interview; The Differend exemplifies its subtitle, “Phrases in Dispute;” The Postmodern Explained takes the form of letters written to children. Perhaps one reason why Lyotard considers The Postmodern Condition “the worst book l ever wrote” (410), in addition to his not wanting to be considered the theoretician of postmodernity and his change of perspective as a result of post-Cold War politics, is that it employs a more traditional format than some of his other works.

“Writing” for Lyotard is a form of resistance, a way of advancing something that is not clear or discovering a means of giving testimony which is not yet included in the circulation of commodities, not yet known (397). To write is to resist “the already done, the already written, the already thought” (397). And, ironically, the writer resists actively by waiting, by remaining passive (397). Lyotard is impatient, however, with the idea that writing is gendered feminine because he is impatient with dichotomous conceptions of gender. He thinks the idea that a male is aggressive and active and a female is passive “very stupid” (406). He is also impatient with the suggestion that his agonistic conception of communication is a male model (399). He explains that the agonistics he speaks of is not antagonism between people but, rather, between language games. Lyotard insists, further, that if he is a biological or social male, he is also female (406). If writing is an exploration into the unknown, then it cannot begin with presuppositions based on an ideology that determines what is known. For Lyotard, to write about gender is to raise questions about it without answering them (405). The question of gender is enormous, extreme, of huge importance because it is a question that has no answer (405).

Lyotard says that “The difference between the sexes isn’t the most important problem” (406). He does find it useful, though, to discuss the relationship between traditional discourses such as philosophical and entrepreneurial discourse and the body. He sees philosophy as a repression of “the bodily way of thinking,” which he defines as a way of thinking, called the anima, in which aesthetical impressions are taken into account in contrast with the animus in which there is no external reference to the body” (406).

Gary Olson observes that Lyotard seems to have an uneasy relationship with the French feminists (393). It seems to me, though, that Lyotard’s discussions of sex differences, gender, and the body are fairly consistent with the positions of some French feminists though at odds with Anglo-American cultural feminism, the perspective that would seem to inform Olson’s questions. In “Women’s Time,” for instance, Julia Kristeva identifies a third generation of feminists who embrace a position that bears some relationship to Lyotard’s. These feminists have problems with the dichotomy man^/woman and replace the attempt to fabricate a scapegoat victim as foundress of a society or counter-society with an analysis of the potentialities of victim/executioner which characterize each identity, each subject, each sex (210).

According to Kristeva, this third generation does not exclude the first two generations but has a parallel existence with them or may even be interwoven with them (209). The first generation, roughly the equivalent of liberalfeminism, consists of existential feminists struggling to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history (193). This form of feminism is universalist in its approach and globalizes the problems of women (194). The second generation, roughly the equivalent of Anglo-American cultural feminism, emphasizes the irreducible identity of women and seeks to give a language to the “intrasubjective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the past” (194).

A problem with the approach of the first generation, according to Kristeva, is that the assumption by women of executive, industrial and cultural power has not radically changedthe nature of this power (201). A problem with the approach of the second generation is that feminism becomes a kind of inverted sexism. She says, “the very logic of counter-power and of counter-society necessarily generated, by its very structure, its essence as a simulacrum of the combated society or of power” (203). It is easy to see, then, why Lyotard is uncomfortable with feminisms that emphasize universalist conceptions of emancipation on the one hand or differences between the sexes on the other. Each approach can easily become as totalizing and terrorizing as the approach it attempts to replace.

Resistance for Lyotard is not political activity of the sort advocated by feminists or Marxists committed to emancipatory projects because he sees that work for a political party or group necessitates becoming a part of the system and hence is no longer resistant (396). Writing is a form of resistance precisely because it does not necessitate affiliation with a political group. It is not surprising that Lyotard became a “real” writer after becoming disillusioned with fifteen years of political activism as a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie (395).

What is it, though, that “writing” can and should resist? In the interview, commodification is emphasized. At the same time, Lyotard sees our present system of generating and communicating knowledge to be ‘the most performative system in the history of humanity” (399). He also sees that capitalism is the only solution to global economic problems (402). His surprising comment at the end of the interview that The Postmodern Condition is ‘the worst book I ever wrote” may be explained in part by the fact that he seems to have shifted his perspective from the dark critiques of The Postmodern Condition and The Postmodern Explained to a greater acceptance of the status quo. I have found it useful to return to these works, though, because they spell out so graphically what it is that needs to be resisted. For me, and clearly for a number of American academics, The Postmodern Condition is still rich in resonance. In The Postmodern Explained Lyotard discusses the dangers of totalitarianism; in The Postmodern Condition he deals with the ways in which knowledge is linked to power in university and governmental bureaucracies.

In The Postmodern Explained, Lyotard discusses totalitarianism by expanding on an essay by Claude Lefort on George Orwell’s 1984. He finds Lefort’s discussion of the book especially useful because Lefort focuses on the “very writing of the book” (87). In the chapter of The Postmodern Explained in which Lefort’s essay provides a point of departure, entitled “Gloss on Resistance,” Lyotard observes that totalitarianism is not fully realized unless it has eliminated the uncontrollable contingency of writing (90). He sees that in 1984 language is both the adversary and accomplice of writing. Writers write with and against language in that writing necessitates going beyond what language has already done. To write is to violate, seduce, and introduce a new idiom into language (89). He says, “When language becomes impenetrable, inert, rendering all writing vain, it is called Newspeak” (89).

Totalitarian bureaucracy, according to Lyotard, keeps events under control. He says, “Nothing must happen but what is announced, and everything that is announced must happen” (90). Events are disposed of to be retrieved only when they illustrate “the correctness of the master’s views or condemns the errors of the seditions” (90). Meaning is fixed in doctrine. Newspeak has to “tarnish the wonder that (something) is happenitig” (91). Events are annulled; culture declines; language becomes a surrendering and a forgetting (94).

Elsewhere in The Postmodern Explained, Lyotard uses Nazi Germany to explain totalitarianism, emphasizing that with totalitarianism, the opposition to republicanism is not absolutely distinct (52). He says, “Nazism maintains the facade of a deliberative organization—parties, parliament—and it can even employ the republican epic of revolutionary wars to dress up the ethnocentrism of its conquests” (53). It does so to mask the reversal of legitimation (53). A politics of terror, says Lyotard, demands deliberation and its institutional organization” (55). Nazism destroys those who would resist it, the avant-garde, the individual engaged in “critical rationalism,” the individual who makes distinctions among the different reasons (73).

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard explores the relationship between knowledge and power. The important questions are, who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided (9)? His answer is that in the computer age, “the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government” (9). Lyotard sees that knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, is in a state of crisis because traditional means of legitimation no longer have authority. Increasingly, knowledge becomes the “production of proof” driven by money and power, a process which is self-legitimating (47). He says, “Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power” (46). He makes a distinction, though, between power and terror. In The Postmodern Condition, force does not take the form of totalitarianism. He is concerned, instead, with agonistic “language games” in which players attempt to make better moves than other players. If players threaten other players and attempt to harm or destroy them, the social bond is broken, and the realm of the game is replaced by the realm of terror (46).

Lyotard sees that the growth of power and its self-legitimation take the form of data storage and accessibility and the operativity of information (47). Research becomes increasingly controlled by government. He says,

One consequence of this reality, according to Lyotard, is that universities are asked to create skills rather than ideals (48). The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed “to train an elite capable of guiding the nation toward its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions” (48). Everything becomes measured by efficiency. Other criteria such as truth or justice are ignored (51).

Lyotard sees activities such as interdisciplinarity and its concomitants, collaboration and brainstorming, activities that are frequently valued by universities (and by compositionists, I should add) as serving the interests of a university concerned only with performance. They are approaches useful to the users of a “complex conceptual and material machinery” and do nothing to enhance the life of the spirit or to emancipate humanity (52). He sees teamwork as especially successful in improving performativity within the framework of a given model but less useful when the task involves imagining new models (53). He says, “When it comes to speaking the truth or prescribing justice, numbers are meaningless” (52). Lyotard concludes this bleak account of contemporary academic life with the dramatic pronouncement that the process of delegitimation and the predominance of the performance criterion are sounding “the knell of the age of the Professor” (53). A professor is “no more competent than memory bank networks in transmitting established knowledge, no more competent than interdisciplinary teams in imagining new moves or new games” (53).

Lyotard concludes The Postmodern Condition by asking how computerization affects knowledge and power. He speculates that computers could become the “dream” instrument for controlling and regulating the economy and knowledge itself which would inevitably involve the use of terror (67). He sees, though, that they could also aid groups striving for emancipation. He, of course, advocates the second possibility, seeing that what needs to be done is to give the public free access to memory and data banks (67). In this scenario, knowledge would become inexhaustible rather than stifled, and politics would respect “both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown” (67).

With fifteen years of hindsight, Lyotard may be embarrassed by these analyses of contemporary culture, may find them too extreme or too hard-hitting. He protests that The Postmodern Condition was just a “passage” for him (410). The book has undoubtedly found an audience, though, because his insights continue to have relevance today. As a faculty member at a technological and highly bureaucratized and computerized university, I certainly feel increasingly powerless in the face of a growing emphasis on performativity and a decreasing emphasis on truth and justice. And I am sure I am not alone. If Lyotard was right fifteen years ago (and I certainly hope he has not changed his mind on this),then what we need to alter this reality is more information, more discussion, more knowledge. What we need is a new politics that would respect the unknown, the unwritten.